“18 years ago the USA had Steve Jobs, Bob Hope and Johnny Cash ….
Now they have no Jobs, no Hope and no Cash.” Thx Jody!

“I wandered in on the end of the Weiner press conference and, in a healthy political culture, this man, notwithstanding his particular pathologies, would be simply too ridiculous to be a credible political candidate.” Mark Steyn

“. . . Kate Middleton gave birth yesterday to a bouncing boy, who is now third in line to the throne after his grandfather Charles and father William.

The wee royal — who’s been dubbed “Baby Cambridge” until the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge announce his name — was born at 4:24 p.m. in London (11:24 a.m. New York time) after 10 hours of labor. He weighed in at 8 pounds, 6 ounces.

The director of national intelligence also lied, likewise while under oath to Congress. At first James Clapper confessed that he had given the “least untruthful” account.

Nixon’s Washington used to call that sort of neat lie “a modified limited hangout.” Later, Clapper admitted that he had just flat-out lied to Congress. Was he disgraced? Fired? Further confirmation of his “largely secular” lie?

“Nope. Nothing followed.

“Elizabeth Warren simply invented an entire pedigree. That blatant lie helped to earn her a Harvard tenured professorship and a U.S. Senate seat. Ward Churchill was doing well until he dared the country to call out his lies. Who is to say that Warren or Churchill cannot be Native Americans by professing to be Native Americans? . . .”

“. . . Senate Republicans, including two members of the leadership, are coalescing around a proposal to block any government funding resolution that includes money for the implementation of the 2010 Affordable Care Act.

“But such a move is a nonstarter for President Obama and congressional Democrats. Republicans have tried this maneuver in Obama’s first term, only to back off later to the chagrin of Tea Party leaders.

“This time, GOP lawmakers are emboldened by problems plaguing the administration’s ObamaCare implementation. But that zeal could put Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in a tough spot. Both leaders have downplayed previous talk of shuttering the government.

“In the House, 64 Republicans have signed onto a letter pressing Boehner not to bring any legislation funding ObamaCare to the floor. . .”

“Unfortunately, I can confirm from multiple sources in the United States Senate that Senator McConnell’s office has begun pressuring Republicans to back away from the Mike Lee effort. In fact, one senate source tells me Senator Lee himself was asked to take his signature off his own letter.

“While Senate Republicans appear to be going wobbly, Speaker John Boehner blasted out two news stories yesterday. The first was an ABC News poll showing most Americans are soured on Obamacare and the second was a story that Democrats are starting to run from Obamacare. The Speaker seems to get what is going on.

“For conservative activists, the next few weeks will be crucial to keeping pressure on Senate Republicans. . .”

Scott Clement, WaPo: “Moderate Democrats are quitting on Obamacare”

“The landmark health-reform law passed in 2010 has never been very popular and always highly partisan, but a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that a group of once loyal Democrats has been steadily turning against Obamacare: Democrats who are ideologically moderate or conservative.

“Just after the law was passed in 2010, fully 74 percent of moderate and conservative Democrats supported the federal law making changes to the health-care system. But just 46 percent express support in the new poll, down 11 points in the past year. Liberal Democrats, by contrast, have continued to support the law at very high levels – 78 percent in the latest survey. Among the public at large, 42 percent support and 49 percent oppose the law, retreating from an even split at 47 percent apiece last July. . .”

“Think back to 2011 and 2012. Many Republicans were deeply dissatisfied with their field, which saw Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum lead the race before Mitt Romney finally captured the GOP nomination. But at the same time they bemoaned their choices, Republicans often remarked that the party had a “deep bench” for the future, and that the 2016 GOP primary race would be an “embarrassment of riches.”

“That was then. Now, even though the race has not fully begun, Republicans in early-voting states are already taking a closer look at potential candidates. And when that happens, flaws emerge. At some point in the process, GOP voters will (probably) make their peace with at least one candidate’s flaws. But at this early stage, there’s a lot of evaluating — much of it negative — going on.

“Some of the complaints: Sen. Marco Rubio has hurt himself by taking the lead on comprehensive immigration reform. Rep. Paul Ryan was on the last losing ticket and might also anger the base on immigration. Gov. Bobby Jindal fails to ignite Republican passions. Sen. Rand Paul can be divisive. Gov. Chris Christie is too willing to work with Democrats (especially the one in the White House). Rick Santorum doesn’t have broad enough appeal. Former Gov. Jeb Bush carries his family’s baggage.

“None are crippling weaknesses, and any one of these potential candidates might look much different a year from now. But the fact is, Republicans are in a period of flaw-finding at the moment, and they are finding flaws in most of the politicians who will make up their 2016 field.

“And then along comes Ted Cruz. Straight-down-the-line conservative, smart as hell, anti-establishment, ready for a fight, professing a principles-based approach to politics — Cruz says what many Iowa conservative activists want to hear. And in the last few days they have heard it for the first time from a man who doesn’t have a very long record to complicate things. On top of that, Cruz is great with a crowd, big or small: he is a captivating speaker who leaves audiences fired up about themselves and their cause — and about Ted Cruz. . .”

“New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner continued sending dirty texts, using a cheesy Latin-style alias, even after he was forced out of Congress by a prior e-sex scandal.

“The married Weiner — who hinted months ago that he had continued sexting with strange women even after a previous scandal forced him to resign his seat in the House of Representatives in 2011 — admitted Tuesday that he’s the author of crudely sexual texts sent to a 22 year-old New York woman, which were publicized today on a gossip website.

“As I have said in the past, these things that I did were wrong and hurtful to my wife and caused us to go through challenges in our marriage that extended past my resignation from Congress,” Weiner said in a campaign statement issued Tuesday afternoon.

“The revelations may complicate his campaign for New York mayor, in which he has so far been polling ahead of all other candidates. . .”

“’I don’t think anybody has any misconception that she’s not going to run,’ Ted Harvey, a Republican state senator in Colorado, said in a phone interview Monday. ‘There are tons of huge pro-Hillary PACS that are raising huge amounts of money right now. She is doing everything that a candidate would be doing at this point to be preparing for a full scale national campaign.’

“The outfit chaired by Harvey — appropriately called the Stop Hillary PAC — has been working behind the scenes for months, but is about to become much more visible in politics in the coming days.

“It announced a slew of political and fundraising hires Monday. On Wednesday, Stop Hillary PAC plans to release a video explaining its mission — though it’s not hard to guess what that is. . .”

“America is no longer the exceptional country it once was, says famed libertarian social scientist Charles Murray.

“The American personality is still recognizable around the world, but in most other ways we are becoming just another social democracy, obsessed with security, fearful of risk, and highly regulated,” Murray told The Daily Caller in an interview about his new monograph, ‘American Exceptionalism: An Experiment in History.’

“Murray, who is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of several influential and controversial books, says a ’good case can be made’ that America began to falter with the presidency of Lyndon Johnson.

“But a good case can be made that the United States was still exceptional in most of the original ways at the time Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency. I continue to hold the views I expressed in ‘Losing Ground.’ The reforms of the 1960s disastrously changed the course of our civic culture, and in doing so destroyed much that made America exceptional. . .”

“Des Moines, Iowa — On Thursday night, the last direct flight from Washington, D.C., to Iowa’s capital was delayed. Most of the weary travelers idled by the gate. But two passengers, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, left to get dinner. Together, they stumbled upon a sushi bar. They took seats, and for about 30 minutes, they talked over fish and rice.

“In separate interviews, both senators declined to discuss the content of their conversation, but they assured me it was amicable. ‘We don’t arm wrestle, or anything like that,’ Paul says. Cruz concurs: ‘We’re good friends.’

“Beneath the chumminess, however, are hints of a rivalry that could shape the 2016 Republican presidential race. Even at this early stage, the freshmen are competing hard for the hearts of their party’s right flank. The contest is unofficial and unspoken, but strategists for both men worry about being outpaced.

The Iowa trip is the latest example of how their schedules, ambitions, and politics have overlapped. A couple of hours later, as they sat in coach, Paul and Cruz both prepared for the Iowa Renewal Project, a gathering of conservative Christian pastors. Cruz was slated to speak at the breakfast session on Friday, and Paul was set to address the luncheon. The soft light of iPad screens lit up the dark cabin . . .”

Bob Unruh, WND: “Coming soon: America’s own Islamic ‘no-go’ zones”

“Expert on terror training camps says expansion plans in works

“Coming soon to dozens of locations across the United States: America’s own “no-go” zones where Muslims install their own courts, government, justice and punishment, much like the zones that already exist across the European Union.

“. . . The president knows that if it is true that African-American males are viewed suspiciously, it is probably because statistically they commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime. If that were not true, they might well be given no more attention as supposed suspects than is accorded to white, Asian, or Latino youths. Had George Zimmerman been black, he would have been, statistically at least, more likely to have shot Trayvon Martin — and statistically likewise less likely to have been tried.

“Barack Obama knows that if non-African-Americans were to cease all inordinate scrutiny of young African-American males, the latters’ inordinate crime rates would probably not be affected — given other causation for disproportionate incidences of criminality. Yet should their statistical crime profiles suddenly resemble those of other racial and ethnic groups, the so-called profiling would likely cease.

“The president, I think, spoke out for three reasons: 1) He is an unbound, lame-duck president, with a ruined agenda, facing mounting ethical scandals; from now on, he will say things more consonant with being a community organizer than with being a nation’s president; 2) he knows the federal civil-rights case has little merit and cannot be pursued, and thus wanted to shore up his bona fides with an aggrieved black community; and 3) as with the ginned-up “assault-weapons ban” and the claim that Republicans are waging a “war on women,” Obama knows, as a community activist, that tension can mask culpability — in his case, the utter failure to address soaring unemployment in the inner city, epidemic black murder rates, the bankruptcy of Detroit, and the ways his failed economic policies disproportionately affect inner-city youth. . .”

Thoughts and a couple of references for Hanson:

First, psychologist Russell Barkley has observed many times that as America became more complicated, people with impulsive natures became ever more handicapped. Second, most of us find partners who have similarities to us. True for drinking buddies, friendships at work, marriages, and – most disturbingly – those between teachers and their students. Third, each living creature makes a personal environment that matches its nature. Enclaves grow, spending money without expectations makes them more resilient, and Sharpton or Jackson emerge because they match the nature of their audiences.

DETROIT . . .

“The city undertook a controlled experiment in what happens if you are governed by a toxic combination of Great Society big spenders, race hustlers, crooks, public-sector unions, and ineffectual reformers. It spent and misgoverned itself into the ground. It tried to defy the axiom of the late economist Herb Stein that “if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” Detroit’s bout of self-destruction lasted for a few decades, and now may finally stop only when there is little left to destroy.

“The city was at the pioneering edge of urban liberalism and discovered that all the social spending in the world doesn’t deliver order, family stability, education, economic dynamism, or effective governance. In the hands of Detroit’s rotten political class, it proved inimical to all of those things.

“The city’s downfall started long before anyone imagined that the Big Three would ever be anything but overwhelmingly dominant. Hardly anyone had heard of Toyota in 1967, when riots ripped the city and a long crime wave began that made it unlivable. According to Henry Payne of the Detroit News, the murder rate climbed from 13 per 100,000 residents in 1966 to 51 per 100,000 by 1976.

“It was the city’s dysfunction that made it unappealing to the auto companies rather than the diminished state of the auto companies that made the city dysfunctional. The city’s mayor for 20 years, Coleman Young, was an ethically challenged black nationalist who hated the suburbs. Under Young, journalist Zev Chafets writes, Detroit had “all the trappings of a third-world city — the showcase projects, an external enemy, and the cult of personality.” And this was in the good old days of the 1970s and 1980s. . .”

IRS . . .

“Delaware state officials have told Congress that they likely destroyed the computer records that would show when and how often they accessed Christine O’Donnell’s personal tax records and acknowledged that a newspaper article was used as the sole justification for snooping into the former GOP Senate candidate’s tax history.

Patrick Howley, Daily Caller: “Jeffrey Zients is out of the country”

“Zients became the acting director of OMB in January 2012 after Jack Lew — now Treasury Secretary — was promoted to Obama’s chief of staff. Zients oversaw former OMB controller Danny Werfel, who was appointed acting commissioner of the IRS after the targeting scandal broke.

“After a Senate vote confirming his successor — Sylvia Mathews Burwell — Zients left his post at OMB on April 24, 2013 with no public fanfare and no official White House statement on his departure, leading Washington insiders to speculate that he “disappeared.”

MIDDLE EAST . . .

“Several members of Congress joined representatives of the special forces military veterans and grassroots organizations on Tuesday to launch an effort to force the House to have a thorough, public investigation into the terrorist attack at Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012. . .

“. . . Retired U.S. Air Force Col. Dick Brauer, the founder of Special Operations Speaks, said the combination of Wolf’s bill and Stockman’s discharge petition “would be done to fully investigate, something that has not been done to date, the national tragedy in Benghazi, where we lost four great citizens in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012.”

“You will hear this from me and others today but we need your help and your friends’ help and everybody else’s to make this happen because it’s our one chance to do something before the anniversary of that tragedy which will occur about seven weeks from now,” Brauer said.

“At the press conference, Brauer’s group unrolled an enormous scroll of a petition that includes the signatures of about a thousand special forces veterans joining the call for this investigation. “What you see on my left is a one of a kind. I don’t think it’s ever been done before: a four-foot-by-sixty-foot copy of the Special Operations Speaks petition that we sent to the House of Representatives on the Eighth of April asking for this select committee with subpoena power,” Brauer said. “The scroll is signed by nearly 1,000 special operations veterans, from the rank of Lieutenant General Three Stars down to every other rank you can imagine, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, all of them passionate about what we’re trying to do.”

“Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), a congressman who supports the discharge petition, said at the press conference that he was asked by a reporter recently about Benghazi: ‘Gee, that was so long ago. Do we really want to pursue this now?’. . .”

“On Tuesday, a unanimous three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that Americans born in Jerusalem cannot put “Israel” as place of birth on their birth certificates. Judge Karen Henderson wrote that the president “exclusively holds the power to determine whether to recognize a foreign sovereign,” and that the president had not recognized Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem. Congress passed a law in 2002 dictating that Americans living in Jerusalem could label their children’s birthplace “Israel,” but the State Department has refused to enforce that law for over a decade.

Over 50,000 Americans have been born in Jerusalem.

The Obama administration has consistently refused to recognize Jerusalem as Israeli territory, let alone as the capital of Israel. . .”

“Judicial Watch has filed a lawsuit against the State Department seeking talking points and updates given to Susan Rice regarding the September 11, 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack.

“The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit was originally announced on June 21, and through it Judicial Watch seeks:

‘Copies of any updates and/or talking points given to Ambassador Rice by the White House or any federal agency concerning, regarding, or related to the September 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

‘Any and all records or communications concerning, regarding, or related to the talking points or updates on the Benghazi attack given to Ambassador Rice by the White House or any other federal agency.

“The State Department confirmed receiving Judicial Watch’s original request for this information on October 26, 2012, but they did not turn over the requested materials. As a result, Judicial Watch is suing to get the information . . .”

“. . . Islamists have in recent months abruptly and overwhelmingly thrown themselves at each others’ throats. Islamists still constitute a single movement that shares similar supremacist and utopian goals, but they also have different personnel, ethnic affiliations, methods, and philosophies.

PA . . .

“When your credit score goes down the interest rate you pay goes up. The same basic principle applies to Pennsylvania. This downgrade means that it will cost taxpayers more money than before to repay the debt accrued by Harrisburg.

The press release from Fitch Ratings makes it quite clear why the downgrade happened (and why later downgrades are possible):

“REDUCED FISCAL FLEXIBILITY DRIVES DOWNGRADE: The downgrade to ‘AA’ reflects the commonwealth’s failure to adequately address key fiscal pressures. “Continued budgetary structural imbalance, a failure to boost the adequacy of pension funding, and the lack of a reserve cushion signal an inability or unwillingness on the part of political leaders to make difficult fiscal decisions. “The Negative Outlook reflects Fitch’s view that growth in fixed costs will outpace projected revenue growth, absent further action on expenses or revenues.

“PENSION FUNDING DEMANDS: The funding levels of the commonwealth’s pension systems, which have been historically adequate, have materially weakened, with annual contribution levels remaining well below actuarially required levels. Sizable increases in contributions due to the systems were required in the current-year budget and are forecast in the coming years, and are projected to consume much of future revenue growth.

“ABOVE-AVERAGE LONG-TERM LIABILITIES: The commonwealth’s debt ratios are moderate and at the median for U.S. stated rated by Fitch. However, the commonwealth’s long-term liability profile including unfunded pension liabilities is above-average, and will likely continue growing given the current statutory schedule of persistent pension underfunding.” (Emphasis added)

“The lion’s share of the blame for this downgrade lies squarely on the shoulders of the General Assembly. . .”

“Another front has opened in the battle over same-sex marriage in Pennsylvania. Montgomery County Register of Wills Bruce Hanes said Tuesday that he will issue marriage licenses to any same-sex couple that requests one.

“Based upon the advice of [my solicitor], my own analysis of the law and mindful of the Attorney General’s belief that Pennsylvania’s marriage laws are unconstitutional, I decided to come down on the right side of history and the law, and was prepared to issue a license,” to a same-sex couple that had contacted him, Hanes said in a press release. . .”

Carol P, National Gun Rights: Pat Toomey

Are Republicans working on another bailout?
I’m not talking about Detroit…
Republican Senators may be bailing out President Obama’s failed gun control scheme.And U.S. Senator Pat Toomey is still doing his part to see that it happens.
For months, billionaire-playboy New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been pressuring every swing Senator to support another push for gun control, and Harry Reid is hell-bent on bringing the failed gun bill back as soon as he can.Unfortunately, Senator Toomey has made it clear that he still stands firmly behind efforts to bailout Barack Obama’s failed gun control agenda.Then click here to sign this petition to Senator Toomey urging him to abandon his anti-gun positions and not to bailout Barack Obama’s failed gun control agenda.
Thank you for taking action right away.

Melissa Daniels, PA Independent: “PA court sides with public over state-related universities for open records”

“HARRISBURG — A recent Commonwealth Court decision could mean more access to records from state-related universities — at least until the Legislature decides to change Pennsylvania’s Right-to-Know Law.

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CATS is a conservative publication, almost free of advertising, and has appeared at least three times per week for the last six years. It consists of abstracts from the wider press, links to original sources, and sometimes, remarks by Jim Brody.